The Research Group meets regularly to share ongoing individual research and offer advice and help We meet usually on the 3rd Tuesday of the month at a member’s house. If you are interested in joining us email the hopehistorical@yahoo.com for details
The Research Group started meeting in 2005 with the principal aim of encouraging members to undertake local historical research by investigating the history of their house. This proved popular and stimulated a number of local residents to look in detail at the story of their house and resulted in the first of the current series of exhibitions held during Wakes Week. In 2013 a Retrospective exhibition was held in the Methodist Hall which featured much of the work of the previous ten years, eventually there was enough accumulated information for publication in the Society’s journal, Rediscovering Hope
In 2011 a joint project with Castleton Historical Society was launched to research the medieval history of the villages with the emphasis on the history of the common people. The project addressed the history through both documentary research, and landscape archaeology and a series of test pits was excavated in both villages. The project was funded by a substantial grant from Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and overseen by Dr Bill Bevan, a well known Sheffield based professional archaeologist. The results were published in 2012 as HLF Research Report 2012 , ‘The Lives of the Common People in Hope and Castleton in the Medieval Period’
Since then recent research has concentrated on aspects of WWI history, published in the Rediscovering Hope in 2015 and 2018. An exhibition covering the four years of the conflict was presented in Hope Church, during Wakes Week in 2018.
Through the Covid years we kept going with new themes on the churchyard, notable names in the village, the centenary of the publication of “Notes from a Peakland Parish by William Smith Porter*” and in 2024, concentrated on ‘Objects in Plain Sight but not always seen’.
*William Smith Porter. Notes from a Peakland Parish, An account of the church and Parish of Hope in the County of Derby. Sheffield, Northend. 1923